Cuts will damage museums, warn MPs

Gordon Brown risks damaging the country's leading museums, libraries and archives if he goes ahead with planned cuts in government funding, MPs will warn tomorrow.

In a report to be published two days before the Chancellor becomes Prime Minister, the cross-party Commons select committee for culture, media and sport will also criticise the Treasury for its failure to attract private benefactors by providing US-style tax incentives and give more backing for museums to acquire important new works.

The risk, MPs warn, is that Britain's major museums will increasingly lose out to their far wealthier American rivals when looking to add to their collections.

The central message of the report is that cuts in arts funding of between 5 and 7 per cent being proposed by Brown could undermine a major policy achievement of the Labour government. The MPs praise the introduction of free entry to museums, saying it has attracted millions more visitors. They also welcome the success of the 'Renaissance in the Regions' programme, which supports museums and galleries outside London, but they voice concern that future funding levels remain unclear.

One of their main worries is that non-essential museum and library services aimed at reaching disadvantaged or minority groups would go if funding was cut. During their hearings, MPs were told that some of the jewels in Britain's cultural crown - the National Gallery, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum - might have to end pioneering schemes.

One example that struck the MPs, committee sources said, was a programme led by the V&A called 'Image and Identity'. Run in partnership with museums in Manchester, Birmingham, Brighton and Tyne and Wear, as well as with the children's charity NCH, the programme has sought to 'engage and inspire' vulnerable young people to 'respond creatively to museum collections through the visual arts'. Such schemes were costly but 'enormously worthwhile', the V&A's director, Mark Jones, told the committee. 'There are relatively small numbers of people who can take part, but the impact seems to be extremely large.'

The MPs' strongly worded message comes after a series of attacks on government policy from leading figures in the arts. A warning earlier this year that the British Library might be forced to cut opening hours and charge for access unleashed a torrent of criticism.

Ministers responded by saying that Labour had hugely increased funding of the arts over the past decade, but that an overall tightening of the budget would inevitably mean some cuts.

The committee is expected to express concern that the library and other archives may now face constraints on acquiring new material and on cataloguing the increasing number of websites and other digital sources of information.

'We are probably in the top two or three [such institutions] in the world,' Lynne Brindley, the British Library's chief executive, told the committee. 'We would move from the top to the middle of the second division.'